Authors:

Yae Eun Moon
(RPI)

Erica Sherman
(RPI)

Frank Fish
(West Chester Univ.)

Terrie Williams
(UC-Santa Cruz)

Timothy Wei
(RPI)

In the past few years, we have adapted DPIV to permit
measurements of flow
around swimming mammals (human and dolphin). In this study, we
apply this
technique to measure flow associated with a dolphin performing a
tail stand;
the behavior in which the dolphin lifts and holds itself
vertically out of
the water by rapid and strong oscillations of its tail. The
objective of
this work was i) to validate the ability to compute thrust
production from
vortices generated by the tail motions and ii) to develop a
quantitative
measure of the thrust production capability of a dolphin. Data
from numerous
tail stands taken from two different Atlantic bottlenose dolphins
will be
presented. Independent thrust comparisons are developed by
monitoring how
much of the dolphins' bodies were held above the water during the
tailstand
behavior. The presentation includes both movies showing flow
velocity
overlayed on the original dolphin videos as wall as plots of
thrust as a
function of percent body weight lifted from the water. The data
clearly
demonstrate that dolphins produce thrust on the order of their
body weight,
far more than necessary to overcome turbulent boundary layer drag.

To cite this abstract, use the following reference: http://meetings.aps.org/link/BAPS.2008.DFD.GJ.2